FWIW I also think your summary of the 2015 article is inaccurate. For example, “EA needs very specific talents that are missing.” isn’t consistent with the section titled “Less Earning to Give”, which states very clearly that more than 20% of EAs, total, should be doing direct work. “EA needs lots of generally talented people” is a much better fit. My own experiences are consistent with that: the people I know who got career advice from 80k or other EA thought leaders in that era were all told to do direct work, typically operations at EA orgs.
Normally this wouldn’t be worth talking about; who really cares whether an article from 2015 was unclear, or clearly communicated something its authors now disagree with? Here I think the distinction matters, because it’s a load-bearing part of the argument that mentorship is a bottleneck for EA specifically. People who got top-tier mentorship in 2015 were told things we now agree aren’t true, but that were consistent with the articles available at the time. People who got top-tier mentorship in 2020 got different advice (I assume, I haven’t kept up since covid started), but how much better was it, in terms of knowledge, than the articles available?
I could definitely buy that EA has a shortage of mysterious old wizards, though.
Here I think the distinction matters, because it’s a load-bearing part of the argument that mentorship is a bottleneck for EA specifically
I intended that more as an illustrative example than the key piece of evidence. (I think I’ve gotten tons of advice that was nuanced and wasn’t well written up in the EA sphere, and depended on someone correcting my misunderstandings)
I think there’s generally a lag time of 2ish years between someone having a clear sense of the advice they give people, and that advice getting written up. For example, my previous post here:
That’s basically the advice I’d have given someone for 1-2 years prior to posting it. Meanwhile at the time I posted it I also had the Mysterious Old Wizard bottleneck formulated in my head, but didn’t publish for another 1.5 years.
(possibly out of date now, not sure if Critch still endorses it), which I was able to write because Critch and I were in a shared social-context at the time, and I got to overhear him saying things. But he would never have gotten around to writing it on his own. And it still took me maybe 7 months to go from “oh I could have written this up in a blogpost” to “it’s actually written up.” And then the post is still optimized for addressing my particular misconceptions, which actually involved a lot of back-and-forth at the time.
And I think the world is actually changing fairly rapidly, and our best understanding of what-people-should-do changes with it, so being 2 years out of date is pretty bad.
FWIW I also think your summary of the 2015 article is inaccurate. For example, “EA needs very specific talents that are missing.” isn’t consistent with the section titled “Less Earning to Give”, which states very clearly that more than 20% of EAs, total, should be doing direct work. “EA needs lots of generally talented people” is a much better fit. My own experiences are consistent with that: the people I know who got career advice from 80k or other EA thought leaders in that era were all told to do direct work, typically operations at EA orgs.
Normally this wouldn’t be worth talking about; who really cares whether an article from 2015 was unclear, or clearly communicated something its authors now disagree with? Here I think the distinction matters, because it’s a load-bearing part of the argument that mentorship is a bottleneck for EA specifically. People who got top-tier mentorship in 2015 were told things we now agree aren’t true, but that were consistent with the articles available at the time. People who got top-tier mentorship in 2020 got different advice (I assume, I haven’t kept up since covid started), but how much better was it, in terms of knowledge, than the articles available?
I could definitely buy that EA has a shortage of mysterious old wizards, though.
I intended that more as an illustrative example than the key piece of evidence. (I think I’ve gotten tons of advice that was nuanced and wasn’t well written up in the EA sphere, and depended on someone correcting my misunderstandings)
I think there’s generally a lag time of 2ish years between someone having a clear sense of the advice they give people, and that advice getting written up. For example, my previous post here:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HBKb3Y5mvb69PRHvP/dealing-with-network-constraints-my-model-of-ea-careers
That’s basically the advice I’d have given someone for 1-2 years prior to posting it. Meanwhile at the time I posted it I also had the Mysterious Old Wizard bottleneck formulated in my head, but didn’t publish for another 1.5 years.
Then there’s a post like this:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HnC29723hm6kJT7KP/taking-ai-risk-seriously-thoughts-by-critch
(possibly out of date now, not sure if Critch still endorses it), which I was able to write because Critch and I were in a shared social-context at the time, and I got to overhear him saying things. But he would never have gotten around to writing it on his own. And it still took me maybe 7 months to go from “oh I could have written this up in a blogpost” to “it’s actually written up.” And then the post is still optimized for addressing my particular misconceptions, which actually involved a lot of back-and-forth at the time.
And I think the world is actually changing fairly rapidly, and our best understanding of what-people-should-do changes with it, so being 2 years out of date is pretty bad.